So, back the horrid beasts came, running on their furry snow-shoes--back down the wind, which told the noses of these great wild dogs as plainly as words that Old Man Lynx was there before them.
"Who-o-o-o," they howled wrathfully, speeding back through the burnt-wood, over whose ghost-like trunks they leapt in the darkness so fast that no Hired Man could have shot them had he tried.
Old Man Lynx raised his whiskered face and yowled an answering challenge.
"Ye-ow-w-w!" he screamed at them defiantly. Then he bent his head to snatch another mouthful of the meat he knew the wolves were on their way to claim.
"Ye-ow-w-w!" he screamed again, as the wolf cry swept nearer. This time he saw two pairs of red eyes gleaming in the darkness.
"I got here first, and I'll make it hot for the first one that comes within reach of my claws," he warned them, in tones they understood without words.
"We are two to your one!" they answered him.
Little did Old Man Lynx imagine that he had an ally so near. To him it was merely a case of having found a meal in the wolf the Hired Man had shot, and of having the rest of the pack demand it of him. So the giant cat took his stand, with claws outspread over the prize, his savage face tense with hate. His green eyes blazed at them through the darkness.
The cowardly wolves paused just out of reach, neither one of them quite daring to begin the attack, yet willing to fall in, should the other go first, for both were wild with hunger.
Old Man Lynx was not afraid. He meant merely to meet each wolf as he came, and fight him off with tooth and claw--or if worst came to worst, he could climb the nearest tree. For the power to climb is the one great advantage that cats have over all members of the dog tribe.
Old Man Lynx himself was lean with famine, for the great storm had made hunting all but impossible for him. Not so much as a wood-mouse had shown its tracks on the snow for days. And there had been nothing in his rocky den save the dried and frozen bones of dinners long since past.
To surrender his supper to-night might mean starvation and actual death to him. But so it did to the wolves. It was to be a fight for life!
Now a lynx's claws are like so many little curved swords of poisoned steel,--and he had five on each foot. He could dig at a wolf's unprotected sides with his hind legs while his fore legs were clinging to the throat in which he would try to fasten his fangs.